Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond

Summary

Part political disquisition, part travel journal, part self-exploration, Seek is a collection of essays and articles in which Denis Johnson essentially takes on the world.And not an obliging, easygoing world either; but rather one in which horror and beauty exist in such proximity that they might well be interchangeable. Where violence and poverty and moral transgression go unchecked, even unnoticed. A world of such wild, rocketing energy that, grasping it, anything at all is possible.

Whether traveling through war-ravaged Liberia, mingling with the crowds at a Christian Biker rally, exploring his own authority issues through the lens of this nation's militia groups, or attempting to unearth his inner resources while mining for gold in the wilds of Alaska, Johnson writes with a mixture of humility and humorous candor that is everywhere present.

With the breathtaking and often haunting lyricism for which his work is renowned, Johnson considers in these pieces our need for transcendence. And, as readers of his previous work know, Johnson's path to consecration frequently requires a limning of the darkest abyss. If the path to knowledge lies in experience, Seek is a fascinating record of Johnson's profoundly moving pilgrimage.

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Seek - Denis Johnson

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THE CIVIL WAR IN HELL

It’s late September and the Liberian civil war has been stalled, at its very climax, for nearly three weeks. The various factions simmer under heavy West African clouds. Charles Taylor and his rebels are over here; they control most of the country and the northern part of the capital, Monrovia—the part where the radio station is, and many nights Taylor harangues his corner of the universe with speeches about who he’s killed and who he’s going to kill, expectorating figures with a casual generosity that gets him known as a liar, referring to himself as the President of this nation and to his archrival as the late Prince Johnson. Meanwhile Prince Johnson, very much alive, holds most of the capital. Johnson’s titles are Field Marshal, Brigadier General, and Acting President of Liberia; Prince is just his name. Johnson’s men eliminated the president two weeks ago, and they’ve been roaming the city ever since, exterminating the dead president’s soldiers, piling their bodies on the streets—as many as two hundred one night—or scattering them along the beaches. They, the president’s decimated Armed Forces of Liberia, occupy a no-man’s-land between Taylor’s and Johnson’s checkpoints, more or less in the middle of the city, a gutted landscape of unrelieved starvation where the dwindling group robs and loots and burns and the skeletal citizens wander, dying of cholera and hunger. In Johnson’s sector are stationed about a thousand troops from the ECOWAS—Economic Community of West African States—a sixteen-nation group that has sent this peacekeeping force to Monrovia with instructions, basically, not to do anything. The ECOWAS forces enjoy a strange alliance with Prince Johnson. Everybody thought they’d arrest him; instead the ECOWAS troops stood by while Johnson’s men shot and kidnapped the president, Samuel K. Doe, the first time he set foot outside the executive mansion after several weeks of lying low, and they ducked for cover while Johnson’s rebels searched out and killed sixty-four of Doe’s bodyguards, hunting from room to room of the ECOWAS headquarters. Meanwhile, two U.S. ships wait offshore with a force of Marines, exasperating everyone by merely floating and floating while the corpses mount…because nobody wants either of the rebels to rule the land, and the only people capable of installing an interim government of reasonable types are the American Marines, for two reasons absurdly obvious to all Liberians: first, because they’re Americans, and second, because they’re Marines. Liberians don’t want another coup like the one in 1980, when Samuel K. Doe, then an army officer, took over and executed the cabinet before TV cameras on the beach. The firing squad was drunk and was obliged, in some cases, to reload and shoot again from closer range.

Doe was of the Krahn, the most rural and deprived of Liberia’s tribes, looked down on as uncivilized and often accused of savagery and cannibalism. Suddenly the Krahn were running the place. Doe ruled in a way generally agreed to have been both stupid and cruel. He lasted ten years. Halfway along, Doe weathered a coup attempt. General Quiwonkpa, its leader, was divided into pieces and the pieces were paraded around town, and then, in order to assume the strength of this bold pretender and in front of reliable witnesses, Doe’s men ate him. Now, five years later, Doe has fallen at the hands of Prince Johnson. According to Johnson, Doe died of his wounds.

The first American settlers arrived in Liberia in the 1820s, sponsored by the American Colonization Society, which was founded by President Washington’s nephew Bushrod Washington. They were freed American slaves returning to the continent of their origins. In 1847 they founded an independent nation and began more or less legitimately governing the Gio and the Mano and the Krahn. The Americo-Liberians, as the colonists’ descendants were called, held sway until 1980 and Doe. As most Liberians see it, their history is wedded to America’s. The U.S. enjoys an almost mystical veneration in the region. Liberians don’t know that most Americans couldn’t guess on which of the seven continents they actually reside, that images of their war have rarely been shown on U.S. television, that their troubles have scarcely been mentioned on U.S. radio. They can’t understand why the Americans won’t send in troops, or call for an interim government, or offer to host peace talks. They don’t understand that among Americans they have no constituency, that even among black congressmen they have few advocates. They don’t know why the Americans are making them wait.

West Africa is the land where God came to learn to wait. And then wait a little longer. The Nigerian freighter River Oli has waited eight days now to leave the port of Freetown in Sierra Leone, waited to bring five hundred ECOWAS troops and two hundred tons of rice and canned food to Monrovia. Waited for the rice to come. For the fuel to be found for the ship. For the decision to be made as to who would pay for the fuel. For the slings to be located with which to load the rice. For the man to be found, the man who had the key to the room where the slings were kept. For the decision to be made whether or not to break down the door because the man who had the key couldn’t seem to find it. For the door to be forced. For the rice to be loaded. For the soldiers to get on board. For the judgment to be reached that everything was at last in order. For the several prostitutes and two Freetown policewomen to disembark with fond reluctance in the early hours, straightening their wide black belts. The River Oli leaves twelve days after its scheduled day of departure, eight and a half days after its sworn and emphatically ordered day of departure, four days after there’s anybody left in West Africa who actually believes in its departure. The Ghanaian troops aboard sing Abool-ya, abool-ya—loaf of bread—as night falls and the moon rises and the schools of flying fish scatter like buckshot before the bow.

The freighter takes two days to land at Freeport, Monrovia’s waterfront. For his own reasons and against the advice of his mates, the captain chooses to dismiss the port’s pilot. He’s going to dock the vessel himself. He plows it into the pier, gouging a wedge many yards deep and causing a forty-foot concrete span to buckle as if it were a drawbridge.

Smoke rises out of the town’s scorched buildings. From somewhere among them sporadic gunfire reaches the ears of the Ghanaian soldiers on deck, and with a single sound, like that of an anvil falling, five hundred Israeli G-3 rifles lock and load. The men descend the gangplank to their peace-keeping duties as the afternoon rain begins. The ECOWAS forces start unloading the two hundred tons of relief food.

It isn’t nearly enough. Nobody knows how many are left in the city, but certainly it’s upward of forty thousand people. For ten weeks Monrovia has been cut off from any source of supply. Gasoline runs between twelve and twenty dollars a gallon, U.S., but you can buy two gallons for eight cups of rice. In the detention centers the imprisoned Krahn—tribesmen of the dead president—have had nothing to eat for a month, and sometimes if one manages to cook up a bowl of broth another will knock it out of his hands in terrified spite. Women move up and down the streets holding comatose infants to their empty breasts. It makes you weep, a Ghanaian military doctor confides. Sometimes I cry, the ECOWAS press officer agrees. Their cheeks scored with ritual scars, they don’t look like men given easily to soft sentiment. A Monrovian who’s just seen Prince Johnson drive by says, I was the closest to him. He pointed. We couldn’t hear what he says. But we know he has love and compassion for us. The man hasn’t eaten for eight days himself. If I try to walk my eyes will turn around and I’ll fall. People will eat anything, and here and there a figure pauses by the street, vomiting out something that didn’t work as food. Cans of Pestall bug poison lie scattered in the gutter, hacked open, the contents swallowed down by ravenous Monrovians who couldn’t read the labels.

The rebels began their campaign last December, coming in from exile through the Ivory Coast to the north and east. Johnson broke away from Taylor not long afterward, either as a result of disputes over strategy—according to Johnson—or because Taylor—so Taylor claims—sentenced Johnson to death for murdering his own men. In any event the guerrilla war meandered and muddled along southward through the rain toward the capital and was never really expected to arrive. But suddenly, at the end of June, they were here. Taylor’s bunch shut down the airport. Johnson closed in from the other edge of town, seized the capital, and isolated the president in his mansion and most of the president’s army in the space of a few blocks downtown. The ECOWAS troops arrived. The citizens began to leave. Most of the British diplomats went home. All of the French departed. A half dozen of the U.S. foreign service remained, and the Marines set up machine-gun positions around the embassy. The electricity went off in Monrovia. The water stopped running. The food ran out. The civil war turned nauseatingly murderous. An atmosphere of happy horror dominated the hours as Taylor’s men, dressed in looted wedding gowns and shower caps, battled with the army for the mansion. The shower caps were for the rain. The wedding dresses were without explanation. Meanwhile, Johnson’s troops, wearing red berets and women’s hairpieces liberated from the wigmakers, raced through the streets in hot-wired Mercedes Benzes, spraying bullets. The people living around the British embassy grew bold enough to ask Johnson’s rebels not to dump the corpses of their victims on the beach there because of the stink. The rebels said sure, okay. There are miles of beaches in Liberia.

Even the Lebanese were getting out, hoping to get back to Beirut. Most of the refugees left on foot, moving out of the capital into Taylor’s territory and marching west along Liberia’s finest highway toward Sierra Leone, streaming along like a crowd after a football match. In general this is a five-day hike over fairly level terrain, but it was fraught with difficulty because Taylor’s rebels—boys from the Gio and Mano tribes, most of them between the ages of eleven and fifteen, armed with AK-47s and M-16s—had dedicated themselves to separating out and killing anyone from the Krahn or Mandingo tribes, also those from the president’s army or the former government. Thirty-eight miles out, in the town of Klay, refugees encountered the first checkpoint. Do you smell that smell? the rebels asked, speaking of the stench of putrefaction on the breeze. You’d better know who you are, they said, or you’re going where that smell is coming from. Anybody who didn’t speak the right dialect, anybody who looked too prosperous or well fed was shot, beheaded, or set on fire with fuel oil. Some of them were drowned in the Mano River. Refugees arrived in Sierra Leone telling of checkpoints fenced around with posts and the posts topped with severed heads. The voodoo rumors began: Taylor’s men were invulnerable to bullets, they shot each other just to scratch each other’s backs; before each battle Taylor’s men slaughtered a young woman and drank her blood and ate her heart; Taylor’s men could turn into snakes and elephants, could stretch or shrink their arms and legs at will, could make themselves invisible. The raping and slaughter of this conflict were no more awful than those of other civil wars, but a certain sickly inference seemed to draw itself out of them: Insofar as they were attached by the threads of superstition to the exercise of certain dark powers, these atrocities became inscrutable.

And now, on September 28, the rice and the canned goods, the reinforcements and the ammunition, also a few tons of cooking oil and a handful of European journalists, have arrived on the River Oli. The new folks can scarcely take in what they’re seeing of Monrovia. Nothing works, nothing is for sale, everything’s falling down, it’s over for this place. The main street, U.N. Drive, lies ankle-deep in water and trash. Throngs mill up and down it destroying walls and fences and searching through buildings voraciously, but there’s nothing left to loot. The ECOWAS soldiers fire continually in the air above the crowds, driving them back from the waterfront. DOE—MOTHER PUSSY, the graffiti reads, ESCAPE/WE WANT RICE and GOD SAVE LIBERIA and PEACE NO WAR. No surface is without its share of bullet holes. The drive is lined with burned structures and littered with twisted wrecks. A jackknifed semitruck blocks two of the four lanes crosswise, a streetlamp from the median crushed under it like a frond. The car dealerships’ huge windows open jaggedly onto empty showrooms where families camp now, keeping out of the rain. Surprisingly, the dogs look healthy. Nobody eats the dogs, the journalists learn, because they feed on human corpses. The people are starving, but the dogs have put on weight.

The safest area to sleep in is Mamba Point, the district with the embassies. Johnson’s men prowl the streets there, and the sound of gunfire is more or less constant, but a jujuesque sort of diplomatic immunity seems to pervade for a couple of square blocks, and people like to believe they’re protected here. Nevertheless, the rattling of weaponry sounds too close too often—and yet it’s impossible to say from where this gunfire is coming. Noncombatants ply between the buildings cautiously: Am I walking in a fatal direction? What’s the weather like ahead? The beach down the hill still stinks of death, though most of the corpses have been covered with sand and marked with driftwood. There’s a little bit of commerce, perhaps, with the British and American embassies, which get supplies by helicopter. Everybody’s hungry in Mamba Point, but nobody’s dead yet from starvation. The wet season is passing; still it rains enough to keep the barrels half full.

Field Marshal Prince Johnson—Brigadier General, Acting President of Liberia, and Commander in Chief of the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL)—wages, as part of his revolutionary struggle, a haphazard, sometimes enigmatic public relations campaign. In late August he entertained ten Nigerian newsmen brought in by ECOWAS, taking them around his sector of Monrovia on a forty-five-minute tour during which he shot into a car containing a European couple, killing the man and wounding the wife, who was dragged off by Johnson’s soldiers and has not been heard from since; he also executed a looter by firing his side arm point-blank into the person’s face. Today, September 29, Prince Johnson takes the step of actually bringing reporters to his headquarters, inviting a couple of American journalists and a French TV crew, recent passengers on the River Oli.

The Field Marshal’s base lies on the capital’s outskirts in the residential compound of the Bong Iron Ore Mining Company: down U.N. Drive past Freeport; past the BMW dealership, now housing an ECOWAS platoon; past the Liberian Nail Factory and the Faith Healing Temple of Jesus Christ and Liberian Marble and Terrazzo Tile, Incorporated—all smashed, burned, looted, with some of Johnson’s rebels on a second-story balcony tossing bottles of Star Beer down on the pavement below; past alternating ECOWAS and INPFL checkpoints, where Ghanaian troops inspect the vehicles, or Johnson’s boys, brunette or blond or redheaded, peer out from behind their artificial bangs and stick the barrels of their rifles inside the cars; down a dirt lane and through the Caldwell Coffee Farm and past the one-room New Life Mission Church and School. Then the dozen or so buildings of the Bong Mining compound begin. The hub of Johnson’s operation is a concrete hospitality building surrounded by gunnery teams, aimless troops, tents, and cars. The structure, no larger than the average American home, seems to float on a sea of vehicles, mostly Mercedes sedans with their hoods raised. From out over the fields comes the crack of gunfire—it’s said that the INPFL executes several Liberians every day—and, from the building, the muffled whomp of amplified music.

Inside, Field Marshal Johnson holds one of his morning concerts. The large main room is full of troops wearing red berets, and in the center of the throng stands Prince Johnson, gripping an acoustic guitar and singing Rivers of Babylon a Creole-reggae version of Psalm 137. He’s backed by other guerrillas on conga, two electric guitars, and a rinky-dink electric organ. They’re good. They could easily make a living in some Los Angeles nightclub. And there we wept, Johnson sings, when we remembered Zion. The crowd encircling him sways and claps the rhythm, chorusing in five-part harmony, their AKs swinging and the gas masks bouncing on their thighs and their bandoliers winking under the strong lights of Johnson’s own video crew, which is filming this occasion. Johnson doesn’t stop when the visitors enter, but he smiles and nods vigorously and shuffles like Michael Jackson and goes down on one knee like Elvis Presley; the troops roar. He’s a fair-sized man, about six feet tall, well built, with an incongruously high tenor voice and a shouting-blues singing style. His cap isn’t red; it’s camouflage, like his fatigues. On his breast he bears a Distinguished Service Cross, a scorpion cast in silver, and a green-and-gold sheriff’s badge. He tickles the troops with another quick step. He wears yellow, high-topped, lizard-skin shoes.

The camp runs on generators and the room is air-conditioned, but it’s hot with bodies and muggy with the sweat of partying teenage warriors. The field marshal mops his face as he moves behind his massive wooden desk. The musical instruments are pushed back to make room for folding chairs. The two American journalists sit together across the desk from Johnson. He’s got a large gavel, but he doesn’t use it; instead, a young press officer invites them to proceed, and there begins an interview, or press conference, that really, at first, differs in no way from the usual kind. Johnson seems to have the answers prepared to a number of questions regarding his views, goals, and conduct. Replying to those for which he’s not prepared, he affects coyness: That story remains to be told, or There we cannot comment. When he answers at length, he tends to lapse into Creole. When pressed on a point, he seems to feel he’s not being understood; he provides more and more elaborate and elementary explanations—he explains the difference between war and cease-fire, between soldiers and politicians, between an acting president and an elected one. Uniformed women circulate with white wire baskets full of twelve-ounce cans of Budweiser; Prince Johnson dips his cigar in one of the numerous ashtrays advertising Kool cigarettes. Behind him on the wall hang two portraits of Jesus and one small pen-and-ink drawing of Yasir Arafat. In the middle of the room stands a two-foot-tall wooden lion on which people have parked a couple of wads of pink chewing gum. He’s offended when his guests ask where the beer comes from. You think we looted this? Would you ask George Bush where he got the things in his office? He gives each of the American journalists a T-shirt printed with the slogans WE WANT PRINCE FOR PEACE and GLORY BE TO GOD ON HIGH PEACE UNTO LIBERIA and BRAVO INPFL. Charles Taylor kill my mother and my father. He kill my uncle, my sister, and my daughter, he says, but that’s not the point. The point of our difference is a difference in strategy. Taylor wants to wage a war of nerves. I want to fight with bullets. He calls Charles Taylor immature. He says nobody’s out for revenge, but the Krahn, the president’s tribe, have to be pursued. He talks about the late president. His body was lying in the Island Clinic for almost a month. Just yesterday we had to bury him because he was smelling. The body, he says, is buried somewhere. He insists that Doe died of the wounds he received during his capture. Doe was not executed. He was merely interrogated. What did he ask Doe? Johnson’s eyes show a little confusion. I asked him about the Liberian people’s money. I asked him so many things. Yes, he says, I cut off his ears and made him eat them.

The journalists believe they haven’t heard him right. Made him eat what?

I have a videotape of this interrogation, Johnson says suddenly. Would you like to see it?

The folding chairs are repositioned just outside, on the patio, where the TV is. Johnson’s troops crowd in front of the set. The Budweiser goes around again. For a few minutes Johnson stands nearby, watching the videotape, beaming broadly, but then he’s called away to confer with Varney, his lifelong deputy.

On the screen, Samuel K. Doe, president of Liberia, sits on a floor in his underpants, his shirt open, his hands tied behind his back, his bleeding legs stretched out before him, bound tightly at the ankles. He’s been shot in the right knee, and his left thigh is badly gashed, apparently by a second bullet. A flabby balding man, he blinks frantically at the lights and the camera and the sweat running into his eyes, and tries desperately and above all to smile: Yes, there’s a war on, a terrible misunderstanding, yes, we’ve been killing one another, but let’s try to find grounds now for pleasantness. He moves his head this way and that as his captors poke at him with rifles. I have something to say, he keeps repeating. Say it! Say it! the crowd around him cries, but they don’t let him say it, whatever it is.

What have you done with the Liberian people’s money? It’s Prince Johnson talking, and the camera pulls back to show him seated behind a table. Instead of medals, he now wears two grenades on his chest. He’s got a Budweiser before him. Where is it? Where’s the money? his followers cry.

If you loosen my bonds, the president insists, blinking and smiling, I can talk to you. I’m in pain, I’m in a lot of pain, he says.

They pour beer on his head and tear his shirt off. What? he keeps saying,

Reviews

At times a memoir, at times gonzo, Seek records Johnson's adventures both within and without the borders of the United States. While war-torn Afghanistan, Liberia and Somalia provide the more dramatic settings, I found Johnson's travels through American fringe culture more compelling. Johnson meets Rainbow Children, Bikers for Jesus, and right-wing militia men on their own terms, and describes them with detail and with humor. Johnson is sympathetic towards indivuals and suspicious of organizations, and his personal search for meaning in a messed up a world provides an interesting parallels to his characters' wanderings.